Motor Halcyonism

I have not used emacs for years. It was my text-editor of choice at the University and in the early days of my PhD. There is not much that cannot be done using emacs, if you are willing to hack around if the settings and the embedded lisp interpreter. The problem is that this hacking does not scale, and eventually there is a conflict, and you can’t start your text editor until you fix your configuration files.

With the advent of Mac OS X, I shifted from emacs to various specialized editors, like TeXShop (for Lateχ) and XCode (for code). In this transition, I did not loose all my emacs skills, many of the emacs shortcuts are recognized by Mac OS X’s text-edition system. The fact that text-edition shortcuts are linked to one key (control) and the windowing shortcuts to another (command) is very convenient for me.

" Make vim behave like emacs.

inoremap <c-a> <home>
inoremap <c-e> <end>
inoremap <c-k> <c-O>D
nnoremap <c-a> <home>
nnoremap <c-e> <end>
nnoremap <c-k> D

I’m now increasingly doing work with the vi text editor, which is fine, but my the shortcuts wired in my brain during the halcyon of my student life don’t work anymore.

One of the mantras in computing those days is to try to live with the defaults, customization are very satisfying and can sometimes be huge time-savers, but they are also time sinks and once you have invested a lot in customizing, you tend to avoid changing platforms and learning new stuff.

Still, having another set of keyboard shortcuts in my brain simply does not work. So I gave in and started customizing vi to behave a little bit more like emacs. My .vimrc file is currently very simple, and I would like to keep it so.

4 thoughts on “Motor Halcyonism”

  1. *gromele* ton éditeur de commentaires m’a bouffé tout mes beau tags, du coup ça veut plus rien dire… *gromele*

    (Je voulais parler de remapper C-x M-c M-butterfly, bien sûr :p)

  2. Perso ça fait des années que je bosse avec vi ( ou vim de préférence) et je peste toujours autant à propos de son ergonomie pour le moins étrange. Mais bon, on s’y fait, et mes doigts ont pris l’habitude des séquences vi au point où travailler avec n’importe quel éditeur avec un fond noir de console, enclanche automatiquement les :q et autres :wq

  3. C’est un peu pareil, sauf que les méta-touches sont à présent groupées par contexte:
    alt – caractères spéciaux
    esc – commandes vi
    control – commandes emacs
    command – commandes mac os x.

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